In 44 BC, four months after Julius Caesar was assassinated, a comet appeared in the skies above Rome and shone for seven days. It was taken to represent the soul of Caesar received into the heavens. Two years later Caesar was officially deified. The description of Caesar’s apotheosis by the poet Ovid (43 BC–AD 17/18), a contemporary of Virgil and Horace, is wonderfully overblown. Although Caesar twice invaded Britain, he could hardly have been said to have conquered it. The Roman victory over Mithridates of Pontus, a kingdom in what is now Turkey, was secured rather by Pompey the Great and a general named Lucullus. In his lifetime Caesar, who served as Pontifex Maximus (chief priest), claimed descent from Venus via Aeneas. Ovid emphasises the fact that Caesar’s death does not mark the end of his line. He pays tribute to Caesar’s great-nephew and successor, Octavian, the future emperor Augustus. Hailed as divi filius – son of a god – Octavian secured the help of Mark Antony in defeating Caesar’s assassins, Brutus and Cassius, at Philippi, six years after Caesar had defeated Pompey at Pharsalus. In 1717 the English poet Sir Samuel Garth edited a collection of translations of the books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by some of the leading writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Joseph Addison and John Dryden, who is the principal translator of this portion of the text.

In his own city, Caesar we adore:

Him arms and arts alike renown’d beheld,

In peace conspicuous, dreadful in the field;

His rapid conquests, and swift-finish’d wars,

The hero justly fix’d among the stars;

Yet is his progeny his greatest fame:

The son immortal makes the father’s name.

The sea-girt Britons, by his courage tam’d,

For their high rocky cliffs, and fierceness fam’d;

His dreadful navies, which victorious rode

O’er Nile’s affrighted waves and seven-sourc’d flood;

Numidia, and the spacious realms regain’d;

Where Cinyphis or flows, or Juba reign’d;

The pow’rs of titled Mithridatès broke,

And Pontus added to the Roman yoke;

Triumphal shows decreed, for conquests won,

For conquests, which the triumphs still outshone;

These are great deeds; yet less than to have giv’n

The world a lord, in whom, propitious heav’n,

When you decreed the sov’reign rule to place,

You blessed with lavish bounty human race.

Now, lest so great a prince might seem to rise

Of mortal stem, his sire must reach the skies;

The beauteous goddess that Aeneas bore;

Foresaw it, and, foreseeing, did deplore;

For well she knew her hero’s fate was nigh,

Devoted by conspiring arms to die.

Trembling, and pale, to ev’ry god she cry’d,

Behold, what deep and subtle arts are tried,

To end the last, the only branch that springs

From my Iülus, and the Dardan kings!

How bent they are! how desp’rate to destroy

All that is left me of unhappy Troy!